What does it mean to say, “Race is a social construction?”

Evolutionary psychologists are continuing to discuss Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests (). The Left on that site refuses to include the work as legitimate, claiming that science is not just about knowledge but it also includes what one does with knowledge. This is a good example of the way the argument is stated:

“Using knowledge is just as much part of science as generating knowledge. Moreover, generating knowledge with no regard for its social value, however broadly conceived, is not science. My heroes are the scientists who cure diseases, make useful inventions possible, and fight tyranny. Knowledge for its own sake? You can take it and do you know what with it. As for Evolutionary Psychology, most of its impoverished protagonists relish in using it as a damper on social change. ‘We can make a better life, but only by combating our Pleistocene psychology,’ they say. This is why Evolutionary Psychology has a bad name. Long live the critics.” (posted by Herbert Gintis, 5/13/2005)

One problem with the above argument is that Gintis clearly is attacking what he thinks are the conservatives in evolutionary psychology like J. Philippe Rushton, Kevin MacDonald, and of course Frank Salter. This is rather absurd because these three academics may be White nationalists, but they also accept eugenics in one form or another, hardly making them conservatives. Likewise, I do not believe any of them are at all religious.

His greatest absurdity of course is in trying to link science with its portended purpose of having “social value.” Social value for whom? We are right back to Salter’s assertion that charity starts at home, and if “people of color” are in conflict with “Whites,” then it is our White scientists who must rise in defense of our people. That IS social value for our kin. It seems that the only argument left in science in preventing a return to nationalism is the moral one, science must be moral or else. Yet, these scientists insist that one cannot hold a worldview that there are too many people on earth, eugenics is better than dysgenics, and I can limit my compassion for only myself (as a free rider), my family (someone who is racially ambivalent), or for my own kind (such as the White race). Hierarchical animals as communal creatures seem to fall into one of these three categories of behavioral preferences. I am not aware of any organism that is a universal altruist—including any human race or ethny.

An extension of the above argument outside of evolutionary psychology, used most often in the social sciences, is that concern for one’s race is not important because “race is a social construction,” and therefore doesn’t really exist. After hearing this argument used so many times I decided to do a search on http://www.questia.com to see where the “social construction” argument came from. Simply stated, it is part and parcel of the anti-science movement also known as postmodernism, irrationalism, and/or relativists. It is in fact a denial of Western science itself. So when someone says, “race is a social construct,” what they are really saying is that there is a conspiracy on the part of White Western scientists to use their ideology and power to promote their own group’s self interest.

In a review of Ian Hacking’s book “Social Construction of What?,” in the November, 1999 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the reviewer states: “Bad guys, like the people Sokal fooled, think that ‘postmodern philosophy’—roughly, the anti-metaphysical doctrines common to Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida—has ‘unmasked’ science. Starting with the claim that homosexuality, the Negro race, and womanliness are social constructions, they go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are too. ‘Ideology’ and ‘power,’ they say, have infiltrated sterile laboratories and lurk between the lines of arcane journals of mathematical physics. The very idea of scientific objectivity, they say, is self-deceptive and fraudulent.”

Humans use language to classify all kinds of things, from TV ratings to waves used by surfers, we classify and categorize everything we come upon, including species of animals, and how cold the temperature feels rather than how cold it really is—called wind chill. We are a social organism, that happens to use language, and we construct classification systems or taxonomies throughout science, including the “social construction” of mental illness. There are endless debates among psychiatrists about what mental disorders are disorders at all, and how they should be classified and what symptoms should be used to classify them. Does that mean that mental disorders are a “social construct?” Of course! Does it also mean that mental illness therefore is not real? No, just that mental illness—just like human races—comes in some very clear-cut categories while others are rather fuzzy and hard to determine.

So calling something a “social construction” is meaningless, and is just the jargon used within the postmodernist movement to discredit “Western” science—because it is practiced by biased, evil and racist Whites. Our evilness even makes us collaborate on inventing quarks, mathematics, and black holes, not to mention pointing out that races differ in average intelligence.

Now that the mainstream researchers have amassed such a large body of data leading to the Jensenist conclusion that different races differ in average intelligence, and those differences are 80% heritable by the time a child reaches early adulthood, this knowledge threatens virtually every program by egalitarians to blame Whites for the “people of color’s” circumstances such as poverty, crime, poor health, etc. (East Asians, as “people of color,” do better than Whites on intelligence tests, according to the egalitarians, because they have some super-secret social-culture that makes them study very very hard.)

The Left then has only a few tools for keeping Jensenism from public discourse since they have not been able to find the mysterious factor x as coined by Arthur R. Jensen (factor x is an environmental cause for average differences in mental ability between races that can withstand scientific scrutiny). One of course is simply to deny that race exists. The second is to claim that anyone who even studies general intelligence and finds differences between races is practicing immoral science, because moral scientists just do not do that—which is a circular argument because science cannot even define what morality is much less decide what is moral. Lastly, alternative types of intelligence have been promoted such as Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” and Robert Sternberg’s “triarchic” theory of intelligence. Both of these scientists get tremendous press and Internet exposure, but neither relies on scientific data to back up their theories. Like social scientists, they use narratives and anecdotal examples, and have been criticized for not providing research by other scientists in the field of mental ability.

Over 100 years of research on general intelligence now clearly shows that Jensenism is the preferred model on what intelligence is and how it differs between races. Unfortunately, the Left has kept this information out of the media and out of policy considerations. If only one representative or one senator would have had the courage to ask how the No Child Left Behind program was going to work, when racial differences in innate intelligence is why Blacks and Hispanics fail in school, rather than the schools failing the students, things would not look so bleak for science when it clashes with the Left’s agenda.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at 09:51 PM in Race realism
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Comments:

Posted by ben tillman on May 17, 2005, 10:22 PM | #

It seems that the only argument left in science in preventing a return to nationalism is the moral one, science must be moral or else.

I can’t go along with that. The “moral” argument is no more of an argument than any of the other “arguments”—they are all ASSERTIONS.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 18, 2005, 01:57 AM | #

No serious scientist denies race. The minority of Lysenko-type Marxist “scientists” who deny race (for political reasons in every single case) shout louder than the others, so they may seem more numerous. I just happened across a link to the site of a chap named Ronald Fonda (in a comment on this log entry at Dienekes’ blog) in which he quotes Klein and Takahata on the subject:
_____

WHERE DO WE COME FROM: The Molecular Evidence for Human Descent (Springer, 2002) Klein and Takahata write

‘’The proposal to scrap the concept of race altogether is currently only one extreme in a range of views. It is certainly not shared by all anthropologists and is by no means the majority opinion of the public at large. It appears to be a conclusion reached more on the basis of political and philosophical creeds than on scientific arguments. Correspondingly, anthropologists who do hold this opinion often attempt to shout down their opponents rather than convince them by presentation of facts. Their favored method of argumentation is to label anybody who disagrees with them as racist. The public, however, seems unimpressed by their rhetoric. It refuses to believe that the differences they see are a mere figment of their imagination. A lay-person can tell with a high degree of accuracy where individuals come from just by glimpsing their features.”

[The authors give a specific example and go on to write,]

‘’Except for some anthropologists, everybody else seems to be able to distinguish people from different parts of the world at a glance by their outward appearance. This apparently is also the view of some government administrators in countries with programs designed to fight racial discrimination. Obviously, there is a credibility gap between some anthropologists on the one side and the public, as well as the governments of some countries, on the other. One way to settle the arguments among anthropologists and to reconcile anthropologists with the public might be to move away from physical characteristics and focus on the genes. If races are real, they should have a genetic basis separable from environmental and cultural influences.’’ and ‘’Provided the races separated a long time ago, random genetic drift should have diversified their genetic composition even in the absence of selection. It can be expected that the longer ago the races diverged, the greater the differences between them will be. Even if there has not been enough time to ‘fix’ different alleles in distinct races, at least differences in gene frequencies should have been generated.’’

[The research discussed in Letter to the Editor of Discover (posted on site) describes the results from the sort of study Klein and Takahata suggest. It turns out there ARE fixed alleles that vary by race, and different frequencies that are associated with Africans, Europeans, and Asians. In other words, there ARE genetic ‘races’ in spite of the disingenuous statements that are publicized in an attempt to obfuscate and deny the facts. Everyone has noted that Europeans have white skins; many of them have lightly pigmented eyes and hair; on the other hand Africans have dark skin, hair, and eyes, while Asians have dark eyes and hair, and Eurasian hair has a different texture from that of Africans.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 18, 2005, 02:12 AM | #

Here‘s more from Fonda on the stated motivations of a couple of race-deniers (I wonder if David B., one of GnXp’s star bloggers and a race-denier, denies race for any of these political reasons?):
_____

Feldman, and his research associates, are mentioned in a paper by David Rotman, called “Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate” from Technology Review; Jun2003, Vol. 106, issue 5, pg. 41. The abstract mentions the “danger of looking for genetic variations among racial groups.”

The danger of these genetic discoveries! If the data really indicated that ‘we are all the same’ and ‘we are all Africans’, (as the media science-writers confidently assure us) would these researchers think that is ‘dangerous’? You know better; but we don’t have to infer their views: they tell us, in that paper, what they fear and why. First, they tell us that the HapMap “will make it possible to spell out in great detail the genetic differences between people from different parts of the world”. [Those differences that Feldman claims hardly exist!] So, “Sociologists, bioethicists, and anthropologists worry that the genetic data could be manipulated to give an air of biological credence to ethnic stereotypes, to revive discredited racial classifications, & even to fuel bogus claims of fundamental genetic differences between groups.” [my emphasis]

“Here’s the rub”, says Troy Duster, a sociologist, “...The danger” [there it is again, that danger] is that people will associate those differences with racial groups, and Jonathan Kahn, bioethicist, suggests that, “it is all too easy for biological and genetic categories to become conflated with racial ones.” No doubt they will, because that is exactly what the data implies: Feldman’s own researchers reported “ ... detailed data on gene samples from individuals from 52 populations...” and, bottom line: “how people categorized themselves - whether they called themselves black or white or asian - correlated closely with the genetic categories.”

Duster thinks that ordinary folk are not to be trusted with this “dangerous” genetic knowledge: he says that “...to map differences between various populations while avoiding the dangers of racial stereotypes is a conundrum without an answer.” He doesn’t quite say the truth should be withheld from us vulgar rabble, but it is clearly implied that genetic researchers had better come to the right conclusions when reporting research. Feldman’s DISCOVER comments seem to be an example of concealing that “dangerous” truth!

Feldman claims those 377 microsatellites show so little diversity we could all be from one village, but this is the same data-set, that is discussed in Does Race Exist, Sci. Am., Dec 2003. That article grudgingly admitted the race-genetic correlation. “...we needed 60 polymorphisms to assign individuals to their continent of origin with 90% accuracy. To achieve nearly 100% accuracy, however, we needed to use about 100...”. This article reveals that Noah Rosenberg and Jonathan Pritchard, formerly of Feldman’s laboratory used 375 of those sets of polymorphisms from 1000 people of 52 ethnic groups to find that, “...by looking at varying frequencies of these polymorphisms they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts, or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; east Asians; ... Melanesia; and Native Americans.” They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member’s self-reported ethnicity”. [What a village!] That information is all extracted from the variation among those microsatellites that Feldman characterizes as having “less diversity than a chimpanzee troop”. While perhaps technically true, the impression imparted is deceptive.

Feldman asserts that we “are all so closely related” because there is ‘so little diversity’ among those carefully chosen microsatellites. Here’s a quote from the abstract of, Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy, A.W.Edwards, Bioessays Aug 2003; Vol. 25: (8) 798-801 http://www.goodrumj.com/Edwards.pdf that gives perspective on Feldman’s conclusions. “In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetic variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. ...this argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.” In other words, this is a deceitful argument, and those who make it know that.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 18, 2005, 02:18 AM | #

Incidentally, Fonda’s site has lots of interesting criticism of the “Out of Africa” theory. Whether “Out of Africa” is true or false makes absolutely no difference that I can see to the legitimacy of opposing genocide through forced race-replacement, but it’s an interesting subject by itself, I find. I’ve never seen a reason to doubt the superiority of “Out of Africa” to multi-regionalism but some of the stuff I just read at Fonda’s site may make me start to wonder about that. Again, nothing that MR.com stands for in the way of Salter’s “universal nationalism” or opposition to forced race-replacement hinges on this question one way or the other, that I can see.

Posted by Andrew L on May 18, 2005, 06:48 AM | #

You must also note that race deniers , well opperate on a Global position, the above three Academicas all have barrows to push, and seriously deflected from reality, Theorising about the outregeous, and John is Correct on this one, Godless idiots that subscribe to the leftist paranoia of Spinoza and Marx philosophy, There in mind, why Islam becomes not a target of redicule by these people, the Ideological barrow is to ,Throw Dirt and hope it sticks. Very Antisemitic, anti Christion, Anti Hindu, anti everything that stands for the reality coseptulized by time and evolution, there is a hint why Islam is a prefered Idiology than any other. And more important, why Zionism exists, because in fact it does not.Zionism exists only because the Islamic cult exist, and they want the Temple Mount, much as they wanted the Targe Mauhale in India, So throw their work into the Propaganda Archive ,The Jewish Question is answered by Karl marx and more of the paranoid scychsophrenics. The Enemy is at the Gates,stairing you down, do not ignore it, destroy it.Survival 101, thats what matters.Not Psychobable.

Posted by ben tillman on May 18, 2005, 04:54 PM | #

I just happened across a link to the site of a chap named Ronald Fonda....

He has stopped by to post a comment at MR at least once, though I don’t recall the topic.

Posted by Svigor on May 19, 2005, 12:23 AM | #

Heh, giving Liberalists the moral high ground via the moral bullhorn has long since damaged their sense of reality irreparably. They actually believe their own press.

God only knows how insufferable Christian moralists must’ve been in centuries past, but at least they weren’t racial fifth-columnists.

On the bright side, Liberalism is the most fertile ground possible for cognitive dissonance. It really is fun to rake believers in received wisdom over the coals.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 19, 2005, 03:30 AM | #

“God only knows how insufferable Christian moralists must’ve been in centuries past, but at least they weren’t racial fifth-columnists.” (—Svigor)

They sure as hell are now. Or, was that your point? Christianity is one of the top four or five reasons race-replacement is going on all over the West today. Or, rather, a misunderstanding of what Christianity requires of Christians is. Christianity properly understood requires no such thing as race-replacement, of course. It’s up to level-headed Christians to start pointing that out to people: “Christianity does not require us to undergo race-replacement. It requires many things of us, but not that.”

Posted by Mel on November 21, 2008, 04:54 AM | #

snore...live in the science, people:

DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.

Period.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 21, 2008, 05:33 AM | #

Any reader confused by Mel’s infantile, very possibly malicious race-denial (just above) can read the following from the MR.com wiki:

http://wiki.majorityrights.com/race

There are many motivations for race-denial such as Mel’s, none of them respectable.

Posted by Guessedworker on November 21, 2008, 11:48 AM | #

Mel,

So you only read studies using single-locus NRY or mtDNA testing. That’s what you are telling us. The recent papers based on multi-array DNA analysis produce a finer degree of resolution - even down to identifying local kin groups such as the French-Swiss.

The political utility of race denial to those who mean Europe’s peoples ill is at an end. Our peoples exist, and have the basic human right to remain as we are, and not be turned into or replaced by other peoples.

If you return here, do so in the knowledge that your stratagem is busted, and you need to learn the new reality.

By the way, what is your ethnicity?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 22, 2008, 01:22 AM | #

Perhaps Mel had better have a look at the following, just up tonight over at Dienekes’:

”Nonetheless, at a time when — due to a sort of mental hysteresis — proclamations that ‘races are social constructs’ are still routinely made, the discovery that not only races, but even closely related ethnic groups (e.g., Norwegians and Swedes) can be distinguished with greater than 90% accuracy, serves to illustrate the scientific irrelevance of the ethnic nihilists and the affirmation that NATIONS ARE, AT LEAST IN PART, GENETIC ENTITIES.”

Got that last part, Mel? (Those last eight words? See them? I highlit that just for you.)

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/11/european-population-structure-with-300k.html

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 22, 2008, 02:29 PM | #

The full text of that paper (my comment just above) is here:

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/full/ejhg2008210a.html

Posted by brad on March 05, 2010, 12:08 AM | #

alright folks, I don’t understand YOUR agenda here, although you seem to think that “liberals” have their own malicious intent...are you really this stupid!? Whoever Mel is, what he has stated here is true, and your arguments do not refute him. Fred Scrooby you made sure Mel got your point by highlighting those words in the quotation you posted;"nations are, at least in part, genetic entities.” Now lets assume we accept that “nations are genetic entities”, although there certainly are many exceptions, especially in places where widespread colonization has occurred (i.e, Africa)...So basically, its NOT a fact...but even if it were, it is a far leap to make the conclusions about race that you have. What we are talking about is not whether or not there are genetic differences between populations, because that much is clear. It is really a matter of degree, and the scientific fact remains that there is no real biological basis for the concept of race (sub-species)

BTW, anyone with half a brain knows that you are all racist and full of shit.

Posted by Gudmund on March 05, 2010, 02:14 PM | #

alright folks, I don’t understand YOUR agenda here, although you seem to think that “liberals” have their own malicious intent...are you really this stupid!?

The creators of the liberal agenda have malicious intentions. Quixotic lemmings like you are just stupid. No, we aren’t confused.

“nations are, at least in part, genetic entities.” Now lets assume we accept that “nations are genetic entities”, although there certainly are many exceptions, especially in places where widespread colonization has occurred (i.e, Africa)...So basically, its NOT a fact

Africa? Wow, great example. Those aren’t nations, you half-wit, nations understood as “groupings of people who share common history, culture, language or ethnic origin.” Those are lands that we seized from savages. Who had no nations, since they never evolved beyond tribal structures. The nations of Germany or Palestine, for examples, are certainly “genetic entities” as much as anything else.

...but even if it were, it is a far leap to make the conclusions about race that you have. What we are talking about is not whether or not there are genetic differences between populations, because that much is clear. It is really a matter of degree, and the scientific fact remains that there is no real biological basis for the concept of race (sub-species)

Yes there is. Whether in terms of genetic distance, or difference in musculature, skull shape, skin tone, bone structure, hair composition, etc or in evolved behavior and intelligence, the biological case for the existence of race is so stunning, so irrefutable, as to be blindingly obvious to anyone other than a tendentious ideologue, i.e. you.

BTW, anyone with half a brain knows that you are all racist and full of shit.

And because you aren’t very bright, your last sentence throws reason to the wind and exposes just what an ideologue you are.

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